Proof of identity
by Madhumalati
Summary: Set postseries. The simplest things gain significance when everything you thought was true...wasn't and letting go can be harder than it seems. TYY, implied shounenai


_**Proof of Identity**_

He gazed down at the glasses in his hand, and wondered.

'_Hold this for me for a moment, would you, To-ya?' Yukito held out his glasses, his warm amber eyes seeming even larger and deeper without them. _

'_Sure,' Touya said and reached out a hand. _

'_Not like that,' Yukito said playfully and jammed them onto his head instead. He looked at the effect– what looked cute on him was terrible on Touya – and began to giggle. _

_He didn't _look_ embarrassed – Touya rarely displayed his expressions for all to see – but Yukito could recognise the tilt of his head and the shape of his eyes and they were far more eloquent. _

_But before Yukito could begin the teasing, Touya blinked a couple of times before removing the glasses from his eyes, seeming suddenly serious. 'Hey, Yuki,' he started, but then somebody called out to them and he simply handed the glasses back to Yukito, exasperated._

At the time, they'd only known each other for a few weeks, and the subject hadn't come up again.

Now, eight years and a multitude of upheavals later, he held those glasses in his hands and knew exactly what Touya would have said that day.

After the Final Judgment, when he had discovered his true identity – or his lack thereof – Yukito had begun combing through his memories with a fine-toothed comb, shocked at how much of his life had been a convenient fiction. Strangely, it had taken him months after that to realise that his glasses were yet another aspect of that fiction; Yue had perfect eyesight, why would his own eyes be less than perfect?

Plane mirrors, the optometrist had confirmed, adding _you look really cute in them, though_ and smiling at him in a motherly fashion. They were entirely unnecessary. Just another way of disguising him.

He wondered half-bitterly whether Yue had been inspired by Superman – or by Clow.

He had stopped talking about his grandparents immediately once he discovered that they didn't exist. It seemed delusional to do that, no matter how clearly he could remember a warm, smiling face or the taste of his grandfather's cooking (_he only cooked on Sundays_). He'd stopped talking about his past, about his childhood; not that many people noticed, since he wasn't really close to anyone except Touya anyway.

Slowly, the tales of his childhood had changed. As he and Yue grew closer, and the reserved Guardian shared memories of his own life with him, Yukito began to tell a different story to those who asked. He'd been found on the streets by a reclusive millionaire and brought up in relative isolation until his fifteenth year, privately educated by a tutor. After his benefactor's death he had moved to Tomoeda and begun a normal social life. Later, when he moved in with the Kinomoto family, both to be with Touya and to maintain his duties as Guardian, he added that Fujitaka was a distant relation of his benefactor; which was quite true, and served to explain the sudden increase in the family's wealth as they tapped into the considerable funds Clow had left behind for them.

The glasses, though……he'd kept those glasses with him, all this time. He still didn't know why.

He'd hung onto them all through the turbulent (and still slightly hazy, like a fever-dream) times when Sakura had been trying to transform the Cards; through the years afterwards, through the end of high school, graduation; through moving in with Touya – which had surprised no one except the ever-observant Keroberos – and joining Fujitaka's team (at which Eriol had remarked that he would never change, and Yue had almost smiled, remembering hours of reading histories in Clow's giant library). They'd become a talisman of sorts to him, one last evasion of what he was and who he was.

He'd clung to them even harder during the long and difficult three-year process of merging with Yue; they'd become a sort of badge, something he knew he could hold on to when he felt overwhelmed by Yue, something that was his alone.

The Guardian had asked – diffidently, quietly – and Yukito had agreed, but that didn't make integration any easier. There were many differences between them, but the similarities had been even harder to reconcile. Many times, the troubles they had faced had come perilously close to tearing down the fragile web of deceptions that protected Sakura and her legacy and maintained their illusion of normalcy.

Dealing with Touya had been even more difficult. Though he'd been more than understanding, Yukito and Yue had had their own issues to sort out and the mixed signals had been quite confusing. But they'd hung on, by their fingernails at times, and they were very close to succeeding. It was hard to think of himself as separate from……himself……now. There was little to be done, now, except throw down the masks and face themselves.

Which brought him back to the glasses, cradled tightly in his hands as he sat on the top of the Kinomotos' roof, basking in the light of the moon.

He stared at them, waiting for something, and he could feel Yue waiting as well, thoughts so mixed up in his own that they were almost indistinguishable.

Idly, he wondered whether he really was waiting for something, or if he was just putting off what was, in the end, inevitable, and from the Yue part of him, he could hear a faint chuckle, half exasperation and half fondness.

He heard a scrabbling sound from behind him and looked back to see a long dark form clamber agilely out of Sakura's bedroom window. 'To-ya.'

'I might have known,' Touya remarked. 'It's either here or the clock tower these days.'

'Well,' he said with a smile, 'I'm glad you came out here before you tried the school.'

'Thinking about something?'

'Mmm,' he said dismissively.Yukito leaned closer as they sat together on the roof, lifted his eyes – not blurred anymore, that had somehow vanished a week or so after his discovery – to the moon, and felt a low purr from Yue as the magic thrummed through the three of them.

'You've been staring at that thing all morning,' Touya said. 'Something the matter?'

'You always knew my glasses weren't prescription, didn't you?'

Touya shrugged.

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'Would you have listened?'

'Probably not,' Yukito admitted.

'Is that what you've been wondering about?' Touya grinned, that tiny quirk at one corner of his mouth brighter than the most dazzling smile anyone else could give him. 'You didn't have to obsess over it. It's not such a big deal, really. They're just glasses.'

They _were_, he thought. Just glasses. Just metal and glass that he'd taken too seriously for too long.

And with that realisation in his mind and the moonlight falling over him, it was easy to toss them over the roof and watch them spin down to crunch against the lawn.

Somebody would go pick it up later, of course. Touya and Fujitaka were even worse neat freaks than he was, and Windy would scold if he left glass lying around where someone might tread. Still, he could permit himself the melodrama of the gesture.

He turned his eyes back to the moon above, held tighter the man beside him, and relished being alive.


End file.
